The Australian Institute of Family Studies is the Australian Government's key research body in the area of family well being and provides an evidence base for developing policy supportive of the well being of families in Australia.

The report was authored by Dr. Deborah Dempsey - a Senior Lecturer in Sociology in the Faculty of Life and Social Sciences at Melbourne's Swinburne University of Technology...

From the study summary:

"Children in [same-sex parented] families do as well emotionally, socially and educationally as their peers from heterosexual couple families.

"Some researchers have concluded there are benefits for children raised by lesbian couples in that they experience higher quality parenting, sons display greater gender flexibility, and sons and daughters display more open-mindedness towards sexual, gender and family diversity."

The AIFS study found that approximately 11% of gay Aussies and 33% of Australian lesbians are raising children. It also concluded that the country's health, education, child protection, and foster care systems still can do more to develop policies and practices that support and properly serve same-sex parented families.

The results of this new study -- that children of same-sex couples do just as well as those raised by opposite-sex couples -- are in line with the overwhelming body of evidence as well as the professional consensus of the mainstreamacademic and scientific communities.

Yet in Australia as in the United States, opponents of marriage equality consistently cite the "same-sex marriage harms children" myth as the primary justification for their position, often pointing to right-wing-funded junk science "studies" (i.e. ideologically-driven anti-LGBT hit pieces) like Mark Regnerus's dubiousanddiscreditedNew Family Structures Study as supposed evidence.

But the study's authors hit back at these false claims. "Research to date considerably challenges the point of view that same-sex parented families are harmful to children."

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